


a numbness in your heart (and it's growing)

by thatsparrow



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25342267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/pseuds/thatsparrow
Summary: Even before she became immortal, Andromache was familiar with the flexible nature of death.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 1
Kudos: 30
Collections: Battleship 2020, Battleship 2020 - Yellow Team





	a numbness in your heart (and it's growing)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flowersforgraves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowersforgraves/gifts).



> title from "a comet appears" by the shins

Even before she became immortal, Andromache was familiar with the flexible nature of death. When she was six, sitting by the riverbank while her mother washed their clothes, Andromache had looked up to see a grey-shadowed woman on the other side of the water, shifting like a statue carved from fog. Were Andromache a little older, she would have noticed how the woman's hair hung limp as seaweed around her cheeks, dripping even in afterlife. The chipped edges of her nails where she'd scrabbled against the stones, the reeds tangled like anklets around her legs. That the grass was unbent under her feet. Were she a little older—but she was only six, bright-eyed and mesmerized by the apparition who crouched at the river's edge, who reached out a pearly hand for Andromache to come closer. While her mother wrung water from the fabric, Andromache pulled herself to her feet, stepped close enough to the edge to feel the mud between her toes. Curious, always, she waded into the shallows, but as the water pulled at her calves, stinging cold as snowmelt against her legs, she let out a small yelp of surprise.

"Andromache!" her mother said with a start, leaving the clothes forgotten as she ran forward to pull Andromache back, to keep her from where the current would have swept her from her feet and carried her downstream. Her mother held her close, pressed a kiss to her temple as she reassured and admonished in equal measure, warning her against straying where she wasn't meant to. Andromache had protested, had pointed across the bank to where the grey lady had stood, but her mother only frowned in confusion, and when Andromache herself looked back, the woman was gone.

The visions continued throughout her youth into adulthood, stone-colored phantoms who traveled through the world looking as they did in death—skull-split warriors and beheaded soldiers, fragile newborns and the frail elderly, skeletal silhouettes withered by hunger and disease. A garden of ephemeral statues that only Andromache could see. She feared it as a sign of madness until she began to match the apparitions to her neighbors' stories: whispers of a young woman who'd drowned herself in the river, a nearby family whose grandmother had passed away shortly before Andromache noticed a hollow-eyed crone hovering outside their home. 

They can't speak, as far as she could tell—or, at least, they never spoke to her, and gods know that she tried, was told off more than once for making up stories when one of her parents found her seemingly talking to the air. If they were aware of their death, it didn't seem to concern them. As to whether they were malicious, Andromache remained undecided; most seemed content to keep to their small corners of the world, but she never forgot the woman at the riverbank who'd motioned her toward the current. But perhaps she hadn't intended to lead young Andromache to her doom. Perhaps she'd just been elated that the world of the living hadn't forgotten her.

She grew older, and though Andromache rarely felt anything stronger than mild fondness for her ghostly companions, she became accustomed to them, a steadfast if peculiar fixture of the landscape. Shifting and gossamer as clouds that had been tethered to the earth. Mostly, she considered them an enigma, and resigned herself to either learning the answers when she died or becoming one of them herself.

But when a sword was run through her chest and she found herself breathing still, watched the wound pull itself closed and her skin stitch itself shut, the question of death became an increasingly complicated thing.

—

The rules changed after she discovered her immortality.

They talked to her now, whether she wished it or not—louder when she offered them her attention, whispering when she didn't. When she first began to hear them, a discordant murmur that followed her like sunspots behind her eyes, she made the mistake of turning her focus to too many of them at once, the ensuing cacophony so sudden and so overwhelming that it brought her to her knees. 

They could follow her now, too. Most seemed uninterested—save for those who had been sent to the afterlife by Andromache herself, who lingered at her heels like hungry dogs, appeared without warning in shards of glass and still waters as a reminder of the sins she carried. By then she had met Quynh and Lykon, but though they shared much—felt closer to Andromache than her own kin ever had—neither had seen one of her phantoms, nor anything similar. So it was not just an effect or anticipation of her immortality, but something unique to _her_ —some indication that, since childhood, she had straddled this line between life and death.

To what end, though, for what purpose—the answer remained as inscrutable as whatever allowed their wounds to heal over, offered them years beyond their time.

—

After, she prayed to find Quynh's ghost. After she had exhausted every lead, hunted every option, after the last of their accusers and executioners were dead and gone (and, it seemed, permanently retired to the afterlife), Andromache wished for nothing but to see Quynh as one of the grey-shaded spirits who had haunted her since she was a child. 

_Please_ , Andromache offered to whatever god might be listening, _please let me know that she is gone. Because I could not save her, please let me know that her pain is at an end. Please show me that she suffers no longer_.

"You said they don't always come back," Yusuf said to her one night over dinner after she had spent an hour wandering the harbor in search of spirits, reaching out to the shades of drowned and pox-ridden sailors in the hope that one of them was Quynh having found her way back to shore. "It's still possible that she's—gone."

"Or she's still in that iron fucking coffin, waiting for help that hasn't come." The tavern was a popular place for spirits; Andromache could see four of them from where she sat in the corner, moving between the tables, perched at the bar, even the ghost of a short-haired tabby walking up and down the stairs. If she squinted, if she drank enough until the ale blurred her vision, perhaps she could imagine that one of them was Quynh.

"Please, Andromache," Nicolo said, catching her hand as she raised the tankard to her lips again. "Please stop punishing yourself. This weight will bury you if you let it."

"No it won't," Andromache said as she jerked her hand free. "Nothing can bury us, remember? That's the whole fucking problem."

—

When she found a moment for herself, Andromache said all that she would to the ghost of Quynh that never appeared.

_I'm sorry, my love. I'm sorry that I couldn't find you, and sorrier still that I stopped looking. I'm sorry that I didn't turn the world over and drain the oceans dry until I saved you. I'm sorry that they didn't take me instead, that I wasn't strong enough to rip the chains from the wall when they came for us. I'm sorry for how I've failed you, and how I fail you still. I'm sorry for all the decades and centuries we didn't have. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—_

—

The years passed. Slowly, often without Andromache having noticed, the pain of Quynh's loss began to sit a little easier around her shoulders, a mottled bruise faded to pale yellow. She still grieved, but she no longer searched for Quynh in the face of every specter around her; the odds had always been slim, and on this occasion, fell not in her favor. The years passed as they always had, the world changed as it continued to do, and though Andromache mourned the future that they'd lost, she cherished the centuries they'd been fortunate enough to share.

Then, in the early 19th century, they all dreamt of another immortal, a frozen soldier swinging from a noose in a snow-swept wasteland. _Sébastien Lelivre_ , he introduced himself when their paths finally crossed—still not a common occurrence, but familiar enough by now that Andromache barely blinked at his arrival.

But later, when Sébastien thrashed awake in the middle of the night, hungry for air like a man starved of it, something in Andromache's blood ran cold.

"It's nothing," he said when he'd caught his breath. "Just a nightmare."

"Tell me." Sébastien had barely known them then, but he knew enough not to argue with the thread of iron in Andromache's voice. He told her, and even if some part of Andromache expected it—even as she began to understand why there had never been a ghost to be found—the answer still laid her open to the bone: a woman in a metal coffin at the bottom of the sea, drowning, _screaming_ , only to come back from the dead and endure it again. 

Quynh lived.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to ba_lailah for beta reading!


End file.
